Sunday, February 28, 2010

As a coda to MRML's series on Graham Parker from earlier this month, here's a collaboration GP did with The B-52's Kate Pierson, Cheap Trick's Robin Zander and Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz on versions of Lennon and McCartney songs the Beatles never recorded. While far from perfect, it's fascinating for fans of either the Beatles or the artists involved.Lost Songs of Lennon & McCartney CD

Saturday, February 27, 2010

A newer British band from Medway (that's Billy Childish country) take what they've stolen from the past - The Who, The Kinks, The Jam - and create glorious, jagged little pop songs as if no one's ever tried all this a millions times before. The new, highly-recommended, album, Pictures, is jam-packed with full-tilt power-pop killers like, "I Don't Believe You":

And here's a snarling rocker, which just happens to be the title track from their last, equally great, album, Rentacrowd.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Doug Bennet and his Slugs grew stronger as musicians and composers but the eighties was a harsh mistress and those who sought her love drenched themselves in echo-ey beats and key-tars. To be fair as a biased man can be, that approach worked for some English bands who led with their haircuts but it tended to embarrass those who'd learned their trade in more organic times. Popaganda is actually a fine pop album and they saved the worst of the eighties damage for their Tomcat Prowl album (or so I'm told, I've never heard it). Hope you all enjoyed the Slugginess!

It's hard to say exactly when The Eighties, in the the pejorative sense, began. Certainly by 1983 things were already pretty dodgy. By that time Doug and the Slugs' retro-mindedness and predilection for gimmickry ended up insulating them, at least somewhat, from the winds of crap then blowing gale force.

Doug and the Slugs were a Vancouver bar band gone New Wave that got a big push in Canada in the very early eighties. The band (Doug Bennett on vocals, John Burton on guitar, John "Wally" Watson on drums, Richard Baker on guitar, Simon Kendall on keyboards and Steve Bosley on bass) survived in some form till Doug Bennett passed on in 2004.

The band debuted with Cognac and Bologna in198o, and it's clearly aimed at being a radio-friendly take on the work of those wordy, angry young white men like Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson (as well as his fellow Canuck Phillip Rambow). While not of those artists' caliber as singer, song-writer or band-leader, this album proves that in 1980 the "new music" bandwagon had room for a man and his backing band who were just out for a good time and a good song. As someone reviewing the Superman musical of the sixties said, "It's a merry adventure into the ridiculous".

MRML Readers: leave us a comment with your views on Doug and the Slugs and whether you want to hear more!

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Like Mutant Beach Punks this is another retro-tastic Anglo-American compilation from 1985. Unlike that one, this one is more scatter-shot; surf, garage, tex-mex, rockabilly and mod doesn't even fully cover the sounds herein. This Ace Records set put the old school and then (then) new school side-by-side, so you get to hear backwards-looking groups like the Screaming Blue Messiahs and Thee Mighty Caesars, AND sixties survivors like the wild Hasil Adkins and the absolutely-lunatic Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

Monday, February 22, 2010

1985's Cowabunga is full of songs about girls and gear that feature twangin' guitars, organ breaks, ooh-woo-ooh backing vocals and a rythm section that keeps it all from getting twee (or as CallPastorBob said "I had no idea surf-rock could be so C86").

Friday, February 19, 2010

Mutant Surf Sounds may like something from within the borders of the Twilight Zone blog but this 1985 compilation has way more faux Beach Boys surf music (a la the Barracudas) then faux Dick Dale faux surf (a la Beach Coma). A wave of fun to be ridden here faux surfers!

Despite the seeming narrowness of it's premise, this mish-mash rips. There's no duff tracks and each band brings a different angle on what we call surf music. As possible highlights, I've included the long-lived Surfin' Lungs rockin' "Who Stole the Summer", the B-girls more Go-Go's-ish "Fun at the Beach", the Ramones-meets-Beach Boys "Surfin C.I.A." by Buzz and the B-Days and, just to mess with chronology, there's Episode Six (who later became Deep fuckin' Purple!!) and their 1966 hot rod anthem "Mighty Morris Ten".

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Critically, Graham Parker's early 80s albums are usually dismissed as lightweight. To be fair both the excellent Another Grey Area and the less-then-excellent The Real Macaw do suffer from glossy production and perfunctory sessionmen back-up. Parker is Parker of course and while there was a let-up in the vitriol (lest he sneer himself into a corner) his lyrics remained knife-like.

(Can you imagine Elvis Costello or Joe Jackson rocking this hard in 1983?)

So what a dark joy it is to find this out-of-print live show broadcast on the horribly-named King Biscuit Flower Hour in 1983 which delivers more heavyweight, spark-squeezing performances of the songs from those more nettlesome albums.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

"We'd play some gigs where the whole front row was swarming with kids who read somewhere that i was the Godfather of Punk...so I had to keep up by being more angry.

Graham Parker

By 1979, Graham Parker had ditched the Rumour horns and a lot of his beloved R&B tricks. Instead, the vicious rocker part of his personae dominated what may be Parker's defining work, Squeezing Out Sparks and the under-appreciated 1980 follow-up, The Up Escalator. The problem was that anger had begun to lose its currency against the flighty values of the ascendant New Romantic bands like Spandau Ballet. Like every other great artist in the early 80's, Parker would be forced to grapple with the epidemic of synthetic mediocrity that had infected the musical culture.

This 1980 concert shows off Parker and the Rumour as flat-out rockers, playing almost exclusively tracks from their two most recent albums. Like The Ramones, they're speeding everything up (check out "Manoeuvres" above for proof) but they're disciplined, never letting the sheer velocity knock them off their game.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Graham Parker showed Britain's punks you could be angry without being ignorant. However, as the punks got angrier Parker felt the need to match them hate for hate, while continuing to school them on how to focus that anger. Once again, Dave Thompson's London's Burning provides the money quotes:

"Our attitude to punk was, we were kind of jolted." We were in a field of one, doing things like : "You Can't Hurry Love" really aggrressively, doing reggae with this angry attitude; we had it all together and suddenly we were not the only ballgame. There was this thing called [Punk Rock]....and it was a bit scary for us. So we thought we'd better crank it up another level and came back really nasty."

And Parker's records did grow more vitriolic throughout the seventies. So to follow up the live show from '76, here's the ever-more belligerent Parker's Live on the Test. This set is made up of BBC TV performances on The Old Grey Whistle Test from 17 March 1977 and 20 March 1978. It's further proof of Parker and The Rumour's live fire-power. If, like Parker himself, you believe Mutt Lange's production of his second album, Heat Treatment, is sterile, then you'll find these versions raw and bloody enough to be a bio-hazard.

MRML readers, leave us a comment about your favourite era(s) of GP's work.

Monday, February 15, 2010

"(My) songs had an unthematic apocalyptic feel that was tough and hard and somehow developed an extremely aggressive stance which was a reaction against the progressive music scene. It was rebellious youth, how society was controlling us, and the other hippie themes - but rocking hard while doing it."

Graham Parker

Graham Parker killed pub rock.

Pub rock was an umbrella term for dozens of mid-70s English groups, each playing their own amalgam country-r&b-rockabilly in gritty pubs rather than stadiums. It's a fascinating era, as the films Oil City Confidential and Sex & Drugs & Rock n' Roll will remind us. However, to those raised after punk, some of those bands can sound timid, as if they feared creating something too new.

Parker, when he broke out with Howlin' Wind in July 1976, was brash as hell and damn sure he was onto something new.

Dave Thompson, in his minutiae-packed memoir London's Burning, records Parker's reaction to hearing one of the former bands of a member of this then-backing band, The Rumour. "I was amazed to find out it was some sort of soft wimpy country rock. I thought, 'What the fuck has this got to do with what I'm doing. I don't get it! People are calling me Pub Rock , what is this?'"

Like the pub rockers, Parker revered the raw vitality of sixties rockers but like the punks to come he wanted to clear the deck and start again.

More on Parker is yet to come, but till then here's part two of That's When You Know, which is actually the legendarily rare Live at Marble Arch recorded with the Rumour. I kept the two parts separate because they are completely different eras and styles and were likely only forced to co-habitate to help sales before it went out of print (though it now fetches $150.00 on Amazon). Its a stunning speed-drenched set of originals (plus a trio of well-chosen R & B covers) perpetrated one sunny afternoon in July of 1976 before an audience of American record executives.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Though the Government of Canada executed Metis rebel leader Louis Riel for high treason in 1885 ("Though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour" said our first Prime Minister, Sir John A McDonald), we Manitobans now get a statutory holiday in the ass-crack of winter to celebrate him as the founder of our Keystone Province. I could tell you why this change of fortunes isn't mere historical revisionism (also known in more hysterical circles as "Political correctness gone wild!") but is in fact par for the course in the creation of national historical narratives or I could play you some obscure rock n' roll by an under-appreciated English eccentric. I don't even have to tabulate the votes, do I?

So, fickle madames et monsieurs, in celebration of this holiday (randomly placed on the third Monday in February), here's British garage-punk legend Billy Childish and his Headcoats, garbling "Louie, Louie" into "Louis Riel"..

Saturday, February 13, 2010

I've started a new blog about the slow death of music retail, called The Last Record Store. I've spent years working in record stores, as I stubbornly call them, and there's lots to spill. Hopefully you'll drop by and add us to your blogroll, your twitter account, your Blogs I follow list, your Google Reader or, best of all, you'll add your own damn stories in the comments section...

Graham Parker continues on Monday, by which time NBC (which allows you to embed if you're American) will have yanked this brilliant fucker down! While watching Grohl go wild never fails to excite, learning that Fred Armisen once played in nineties noise-rockers Trenchmouth was the WTF moment.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Graham Parker, like Dylan, played the lone troubadour with an acoustic guitar. Parker's self-described "Lonely-boy-on-the-road-and-in-the-bedsit" period was very low profile and collections of this material didn't show up until the 21st century. That's When You Know is such a (now out-of-print) collection of demos from 1975 and is actually quite revealing. Songs like "That's When You Know" and "I Got My Soul" show off his raw talent as a singer and as a songwriter, sans hyphen.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

"When I first started out ... the first thing written in the paper is, ‘Could this be the new Bob Dylan?' It's like, I'm getting away with it. They don't know. They haven't spotted it yet, how bad I really am. There's that feeling. On the other hand, there's this huge ego thing that--Hey, maybe I AM the new Bob Dylan! I think I AM! Which drives you onwards. You need this kind of drive because it's hard work, this. It's really brutal."

Graham Parker

Critically, Graham Parker is never allowed to stand alone. He's always either lumped in with the Angry Young Men of seventies new wave, Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, or he's labeled an acolyte of sixties rockers like Van Morrison and, mais d'accord, Bob Dylan. Trouser Press, Rolling Stone, Popmatters and even Wikipedia all can't resist connecting Dylan to Parker as angry skinny white guys in shades pilfering from African-American musical traditions.

But it's just not that simple.

Parker's earned his own place in history. To begin with GP and his near-perfect backing band, The Rumour, broke-out well before Costello and Jackson or even the dated term, new wave. As to Parker's resemblance to his precursors, it's overstated. Sure Parker learned from a grab-bag of soul singers, Van Morrison chief among them but his razor-sharp voice is all his own. And, while Parker's debt to Dylan is clear in his taut song-writing, his lyrical acidity and his fierce delivery, twenty-some albums later it's clear that Parker's not only borne the brutal weight of history he's added his own heft to it.

Here's Dylan spinnin' GP's "Back to Schooldays" on his Theme Time Radio Hour show

And here's GP doing "I Threw It All Away" from Dylan's Nashville Skyline

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Heading back in time, let us examine Devo's mid-seventies basement tapes via these long out-of-print Rykodisc collections. While Volume One does contain early version of later classics, like "Mongoloid", "Jocko Homo" and their cover of the Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", most of these fifteen tracks had never been heard before this was released in 1990.

The results, as the title makes clear (but the covert art muddies), are not for the lightweight, "Whip It" loving Devo fans. No, to love this pointy-headed artiness ya gotta wanna understand.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Nothing about Devo really made sense: not their ever-changing matching outfits and hats, their AC/DC meets Kraftwerk sound, their undergrad philosophy of De-Evolution, their robotic cover of classic rock staples, their nerdy synchronized dance movements and, least sensible of all, the fact that for a time in the late seventies and early eighties, they defined punk to the straight world in North America.

All those incomprehensible elements (their defining punk aside), their alien-ness made Devo irresistible to those who sorta understood. Even though I was listening to a steady diet of North American hardcore and British punk, I had tapes of every Devo album (though I admit that, fittingly, they got gradually worse through till 1984's Shout). Blame it on Fridays, that easier-for-kids-to-see version of Saturday Night Live for whom Devo was practically the house band.

This bootleg includes all those Fridays appearances as well as ones on Letterman, SNL and a set from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It all makes clear Devo's complicated but comprehensible influence on much of modern music.

MRML Readers: Leave us a comment with your take on Devo and whether or not you want to hear more!

Sunday, February 7, 2010

After the Beach Mutants (see here) broke up, then-bassist Brad Johnston's next band, Artificial Life (with Mike Brownlee on drums, Damon Hill and Jason Syrota on guitars, Jay Smith on lead vocals), took over as Winnipeg's kings of punk. Only now instead of monopolizing the basement of Wellington's they ruled the roost at the by-the-punk-for-the-punks club, The Cauldron. Listening to these songs, like "Death Dive", I was taken aback at its resemblance, musically, lyrically and vocally to S.N.F.U. It's not that they were slavish imitators - there's lots of little arrangement tricks and vocal hooks that are all their own - but it's obvious that S.N.F.U. visited Winnipeg constantly in this time.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Here, to set the warped record straight on Winnipeg's mid-eighties punk overlords, is Paul "Willy" Williamson, automotive columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and current lead singer of The Gearheads.

"The Beach Mutants were from Charleswood. The lead singer was Pete McCormick. Most of the band members attended Shaftsbury High School, and were the only punks in a predominantly "rich kid" school. Hits included a rewrite of "My Generation" titled..."My Masturbation", and a little ditty called "Fuck Monster"...("I think I saw the fuck monster sliding down a banister, I think I saw this scary guy with his dick caught in his fly"). I was basically the chief roadie, but I used to sing "Born to be Wild" and a couple of really fast Neil Young covers. Brad Johnston on lead guitar, his little brother Garth played drums sometimes, but it was usually Mike Stevens. Steve Benedictson was the original bass player, he was replaced by Wycliffe Hartwig, who incidentally is now an actor and had a role in the TV series Stargate. The band played many gigs in the mid 80s, including countless trips to the basement of Wellingtons and a tour of western Canada where they opened for (jangle-pop band) the Grapes of Wrath. In 1984 we rented a video camera from Global Video and made a movie called Pizza Guy. It had Beach Mutant songs in the soundtrack. It was an ambitious project. Basically, I would take a pizza, and with the camera hidden in the bushes, knock on someone's door and try to deliver the pizza that they never ordered. I had a Mohawk at the time, and they put fake blood on my face and shirt, so I looked pretty messed up. I actually convinced one lady to buy the pizza...it was three days old."

Here's the press-kit, such as it was from 1986 (click to enlarge) .

Their relentless gigging (I must have seen them a dozen times) transformed The Beach Mutants into a ferocious monster. Pete McCormarck was a feral frontman and the huge, imposing Wycliff anchored the band with his guttural bass and backing vocals. Eventually they released one of the cheapest-looking, thinnest-sounding punk singles of all time, Christmas, Grandma.... Polka Dot Pyjamas. You can still hear the glorious recklessness, especially in their gonzo re-write of "My Generation" and their Reefer Madness inspired "I Need Dope" but you've got to really crank it to approximate the live experience.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Punk Rock was prophetic: its forbearers were voices in the wilderness, its leaders reveled in ‘the-axe-is-at-the-root-of–the-tree’ proclamations and its followers envisioned a rule-less paradise wherein each believer wrought their own culture. But even fierce prophets struggle with local acceptance; since once their prophecies come to pass they’re left to explain the fall-out. Like that glut of cheap CD compilations that still clog up retail racks, those are punk rock's fault. Before punk, the compilation, soundtracks aside, was primarily an exercise in nostalgia, a history lesson. But punk and especially hardcore would turn those sepia snapshots of the good old days into blurry Polaroids of the near future. The Rodney on the Roq compilations envisioned LA punk’s long desert-march to the pop charts and Bruce Pavit and co.’s American Youth Report, besides being a near-perfect compilation, predicted the riotous growth of the American Underground.

It Came From the Pit, alongside Something to Believe Infrom California’s Better Youth Organization laid bare Canada’s contribution to this Revelation. Besides the requisite thrashy hardcore acts like Ontario's Problem Children, ICFTP featured the garage rock of Vancouver's Enigmas, the jazz-punk of Victoria's NoMeansoNo, the proto-riot grrl of Winnipeg's Ruggedy Anne’s (coming soon!) and Edmonton's S.N.F.U.' (more here) doing a ripping take on Warren Zevon's "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me So". By accommodating different musical sects, albums like this not only helped ease the underground schism of the mid-eighties, they also foretold a plague of budget-priced punk compilation CD's to come.

Disclaimer

MRML is a blog about the devestating effects of culture: music, politics, comics plus etc. blah blah blah. At times MRML will post fine, unpurchasable three-chord obscurica (punk, pop-punk, new wave, mod, power-pop, gospel, reggae, hardcore, rockabilly, folk, country...whatever.) - - - - - - "The otherwise unavailable files in this blog are posted for a limited time and are intended for educational, non-commercial use. These files were transcribed from what are believed to be out-of-print sources. If you are aware of any of these items being readily available from commercial sources, or if any of these files infringe upon rights that you hold, please notify us so that we can quickly remove the referenced items immediately." - - - SUPPORT THE ARTISTS - BUY MUSIC!